This led to a long twitter-spat involving Steve Mcintyre, Doug McNeall, Richard Betts and others.

In the past, warming was generally thought to be a good thing. Here are a few illustrations of this.

Arrhenius, 1904

In 1904, Arrhenius wrote that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide due to the burning of fossil fuels could be beneficial, making the Earth’s climates “more equable,” stimulating plant growth, and providing more food for a larger population.

Callendar, 1938

In conclusion it may be said that the combustion of fossil fuel, whether it be peat from the surface or oil from 10,000 feet below, is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power. For instance the above mentioned small increases of mean temperature would be important at the northern margin of cultivation, and the growth of favourably situated plants is directly proportional to the carbon dioxide pressure (Brown and Escombe, 1905). In any case the return of the deadly glaciers should be delayed indefinitely.

Gordon Manley, 1951

Manley is best known for establishing the Central England Temperature (CET) record. In 1944 he gave a lecture and wrote a paper, discussed here, about warming, and in 1951 wrote another paper saying that “the present improvement appears to have set in about 1925-30”.

UNESCO Report, 1963

UNESCO published a long report in 1963 on Changes of Climate, with articles published in both English and French. There are several references to “amelioration”, such as “the finding of a climatic amelioration during the previous 100-150 years” (p 8) and “recent climatic amelioration” (p 327).

Barry and Chorley, 1970

Roger Barry and Richard Chorley wrote a textbook, first published in 1968, called “Atmosphere, Weather and Climate”. New editions of it are still available. If you look at the 1970 edition on Google books, you will find on page 277 the statement that “Unfortunately the latest evidence suggests that the warm period of the 1920s and 1930s has come to an end.” You won’t find that in the latest edition of course. At some later stage, that sentence was removed.

Hubert Lamb, 1973

Here’s an article from 1973 by Hubert Lamb (scroll down to page 17) in which he talks of the warming in the early 20th century “opening up new pastures and land for cultivation” and “increasingly genial conditions”. He goes on to say that “It soon became clear, however, that carbon dioxide was not the whole story” and “For the past 25 to 30 years the Earth has been getting progressively cooler again”. Lamb was of course the founder of CRU.

So it seems that it was a truth universally acknowledged that warmer climates were beneficial, until at least the 1970s. But then something happened in the 1980s. Decades, if not centuries, of science and common sense were overthrown and replaced with the vast, self-reinforcing, political bandwagon of groupthink that we have today.

49 thoughts on “When did warming change from good to bad?”

Ed’s question is a bit of a loaded one. He seems to be asking: what actual, observable negative impacts have there been which are attributable to global warming? To which the answer is, basically, none. Plenty of ‘bad weather’ of course which has been attributed to global warming, but the evidence for that attribution is a bit lacking to say the least. Identified negative effects, as far as I can see, amount to nothing more than a list of the hypothesised effects of projected ‘dangerous’ (2C+) future global warming. As such, they don’t exist, except in climate science cyberspace.

Safe to say that the -ve impacts of global warming thus far have been negligible to non-existent and those regional impacts 'identified' as being -ve have not been unequivocally linked to climate change & may indeed be just 'weather'. We do have many hypothesised -ve impacts tho.

d’Arge, R. C. 1979. Climate and economic activity, Proceedings of the World Climate
Conference, a conference of experts on climate and mankind, Geneva, 12-13
February 1979: 652-681. Geneva: World Meteorological Organization.

In February 1979, at the first ever World Climate Conference, meteorologists would for the first time raise a chorus of warming concern. These meteorologists were not only Americans. Expert interest in the carbon dioxide threat had arisen during the late 1970s in Western Europe and Russia as well. However, there seemed to be nothing in particular that had triggered this interest. There was no new evidence of particular note. Nor was there any global warming to speak of. Global mean temperatures remained subdued, while in 1978 another severe winter descended over vast regions of North America. The policy environment also remained unsympathetic. Pg.184

At last, during the early 1980s, Nature gave some clear signals that it was coming out on the side of the warmers. In the early 1980s it started to become clear that the four-decade general cooling trend was over. Weather station records in the northern mid-latitudes began again to show an upward trend, which was traceable back to a turnaround during the 1970s. James Hansen was early in announcing this shift, and in doing so he also excited a foreboding of manmade warming. Pg.193

#1 We are waiting for Britain to get a Mediterranean Climate, that is what we were promised
..and that the first TV programs later.
#2 Didn’t building the doom narrative start with Al Gore’s movie in 2006 ?
.. our local paper was telling us that Scunthorpe would soon be immersed by rising seas
barking mad cos the town is on a hil 80m above sea level
#3 Historical Context
: Bad Times : the mini ice age and London frost fairs
years when super volcano eruptions caused there to be almost no summer etc
: Good times : Medieval Climate Optimum,wasn’t that when things grew in Greenland etc. ?
..Wasn’t there another warm period in Roman times ..growing grapes in Britain etc. ?
#4 Apart from the idea of poles melting and sea levels rising other doom narratives started to get built
malaria was set to increase, refugees were set to increase, crops were supposed to fail rather than increase
…whilst the idea that warming would reduce winter cold deaths is somehow avoided.

Yesterday’s Radio4 You and Yours prog
..OMG Climate Change ..Champagne growers are having to think about new grape varieties
long item ..but I found nothing on Google
It struck me as more PR than science
News “2017 record year for champagne sales”
..there wasn’t talk of any falling grape growth
“marketable yield has been set at 10,800 kilograms per hectare, which is identical to last year’s figure”

Does anyone think that a large amount of warming 4C is actually likely to happen. I don’t.. therefore referring to it is pointless, planning policies on it, also pointless.. how many impact papers, only use rcp8.5 scenarios, I asked numerous scientists why their paper only uses 8.5.. because scariest,…? But it is not remotely likely

One of the things that helped to turn me into a sceptic (I wasn’t always one, to answer Brad’s question on another thread) was the one-sided alarmism around warming – the idea that it could only bring bad news, and nothing about it might be beneficial. That is so obviously preposterous, that I started to query why sane people could hold that view. I’m still asking myself the question, and still haven’t come up with an answer.

I think if one was looking for a consensus which encompassed both sceptics and the warming convinced, it would be that a large (e.g. 4C) amount of global warming happening over a relatively short time scale (hundreds of years) would very likely be detrimental to humans and the planet as a whole. But it hasn’t happened and sceptics are not convinced it will happen, whereas alarmists are convinced that it will happen. All we have so far is a moderate (1C) amount of post-industrial warming, not all of which the IPCC directly attributes to GHGs. The remaining 0.65C or so which scientists do attribute to GHGs has been net beneficial to human beings. Alarmism and the negative effects of global warming are almost exclusively premised upon science-based projections of what MIGHT happen, not on what HAS happened, despite attempts to claim that model projections are bang on track.

But it hasn’t happened and sceptics are not convinced it will happen, whereas alarmists are convinced that it will happen.

There’s never been a suggestion that we should already have seen a large amount of warming already. The warming we’ve seen to date is entirely consistent with warming by another ~3C if we continue to increase our emissions. If you accept that a large amount of global warming (~4C) happening over a relatively short period (~100 years) could well have a detrimental impact, then surely you would then be comfortable with thinking about ways to reduce our emissions?

No Ken, because up until 2013, when the planet had barely warmed at all for the previous 15 years and scientists were puzzling as to why the models got it wrong, projected warming was not on track and it was only (superficially) put back on track by the emergence of the Pacific ocean warm blob and the subsequent very powerful El Nino (along with some judicious Karlization of the surface temperature record) – events not obviously related to generalised global GHG warming. The world is now cooling. The ‘pause’ may soon be re-established. The models will then be once again ‘wrong’ or ‘running too hot’. That may not happen. Rapid global warming may resume in earnest, but with the ‘pause’ still not unequivoaclly explained and with the rapid warming post 1976 still not definitively, empirically attributed almost entirely to emissions, I’m comfortable waiting for the evidence to catch up with the theory before saying we should definitely reduce emissions. Having said that, I’m not averse to those more cautious among us reducing emissions EFFECTIVELY by switching to ‘cleaner’ gas and zero carbon nuclear, but wasting billions on inefficient, expensive and economically, environmentally and socially destructive renewables is not a sane response to a hypothesised crisis in my opinion.

Amazing.
The mental disability if the climate obsessed is even more ignorant than I imagined.
However, where were the early questioners (skeptics) in pointing this out?
Shame on us all for not asking this most basic of questions decades ago.

Jaime,
It sounds like (and correct me if I’m wrong) that you’re suggesting that climate sensitivity is probably low enough that the chance of warming by ~4C in the next century, even if we increase our emissions, is low enough to not be particularly concerned. However, even some of the more recent studies that suggest climate sensitivity could be on the low side, do not rule out the higher climate sensitivity values with high confidence. So, do you have any robust evidence to support the suggestion that ~4C on a century timescale is unlikely?

Ken, there is no ‘robust’ evidence one way or t’other on climate sensitivity. This is why the IPCC latest report gives an ECS ‘likely’ range of 1,5 -4.5C and doesn’t even feel confident enough to suggest a ‘best estimate’. No doubt you can quote recent studies which ‘suggest’ climate sensitivity is higher and may not even be constant but may increase in the future, but I doubt such studies would qualify as ‘robust’ evidence for assuming ECS>3C. But of course, climate sensitivity is only one side of a coin. Natural variability (internally and externally forced) is the other side and if climate scientists have underestimated this, near term future warming may be more subdued or (unlikley) even greater. Moreover, if they’ve got the amplitude AND the phasing wrong, their climate sensitivity estimates begin to look very suspect.

Okay, my understanding of one reason why it went from “probably okay” to “could be bad” is that some of the early work did not consider it possible to emit enough CO2 for the warming to be particularly large. Now, however, it seems clear that we can indeed emit enough to produce ~4C of global warming on ~100 year timescales. My own view is not so much that it went from “good” to “bad”, but that it went from “probably not bad, maybe good” to “could be really bad, should we do something to avoid this?” I’m gather that most who frequent this site think the answer to the latter questions is “no, let’s not bother”.

I’ll add, that I think another issue was that it wasn’t initially clear what the natural sinks would do. It was only in about 1960, when I think Roger Revelle (of Revelle factor) pointed out that there was a limit to how much of our emissions could be taken up by the oceans (on century timescales, at least).

Yes, I agree there does seem to be a type of person who are disingenuous and don’t engage in proper debate, rather they use PR tricks etc.
A standard MO is
Mispresent/Smear&Sneer/Dismiss/Runaway

Bettsy’s talk of 4C seems like that
An attempt to reframe the debate as such an extreme.
You might as well ask
“Does anyone think that if a large amount of warming (eg. 40C) were to happen, the overall impacts would be beneficial to humans?”
Or
“Does anyone think that if a large amount of COOLing (eg. 40C) were to happen, the overall impacts would be beneficial to humans?”

#1 I do wonder what’s the warmest the planet life has already endured
..was it once 4C warmer than today.

#2 You don’t have to worry about such extremes as 4C
That’s like saying you shouldn’t drive along a road cos 1000Km down is an active volcano crator.
First you drive the first 100Km you can decide later to stop and try to make efforts to come back.
…Right now obviously we could have another 1C warming which could be net beneficial , whereas 40C wouldn’t be.
And at present rates it seems a long way time to more than another 1C warming
And we know tech doesn’t stand still and that getting fusion working is in the possible scenarios so then it would be possible to reduce manmade CO2 to close to zero as well as launch geo-engineering measures.

One ProjectFear was that droughts would increase.
Then they said , no summers would get wetter.
Yet there was no talk of that being a positive thing..cos that would reduce droughts.

It’s a kind of negative-gambler thing where people consider losses but not their wins.
I was led to believe that Global Warming would cause me suffering in my lifetime, but it doesn’t look like that is going to happen.
What does cause me suffering is Green costs and subsidies.

ATTP slinks in to rewrite history.
Bunk on you, Ken.
Yes the alarmists predicted there would be a great deal of warming by now, great increases in frequency of bad weather, slr, oa, etc.
But you haven’t honestly answered the question of when warming became apocalyptic.
Your answer is awaited with bated breath.

On this occasion, I disagree, and think that in his last contribution aTTP has tried to stay on-topic and answer the question, which I for one welcome. That’s not to say I agree with him, of course.

It’s a pity in one sense that none of us will be here in 100 years, because I would put a large bet on that this statement will be proved to be wrong, and I would like to be around to collect my winnngs:

“Now, however, it seems clear that we can indeed emit enough to produce ~4C of global warming on ~100 year timescales.”

As for “…it went from “probably not bad, maybe good” to “could be really bad, should we do something to avoid this?” I’m gather that most who frequent this site think the answer to the latter questions is “no, let’s not bother”.” The problem with stating it like this is that it seems to suggest (at least I read it that way) that sceptics are aware of the risk but choose not to bother to do anything about it. Whereas, the reality(of my position, at least) is much more complex:

I doubt the risk as stated, both in terms of its likelihood and the extent of any downside.

Even if the asserted risk were true, I think we would need a complex evaluation of the costs and benefits of doing nothing, versus the costs and benefits of doing enough to reduce the risk to a smaller level but not eliminate it, versus the costs and benefits of doing whatever is necessary to eliminate the risk. Any such evaluation would need to take into account the fact that we cannot anticipate what nature might throw at us by way of natural climate variation quite aside from AGW.

Finally (for now, at least) I would observe that most of the world is doing nothing much of any use to “do something to avoid this”, and the likes of the Paris Climate Agreement, so much vaunted by the world of alarmism, is in fact a joke in terms of trying to “do something to avoid this”. In the meantime, as stewgreen and others point out, £$ trillions are being spent in blighting our beautiful visual environment and redistributing money from the poor to the rich.

When the world of climate alarmism comes up with a practical plan to “do something to avoid this”, which does not involve trashing the planet and widening the gap between poor and rich, and which actually achieves something rather than posturing and paying lip service to the goal, then – and only then – might I start to take the people who inhabit that world seriously.

I think it was Budykov with his over the top climate sensitivity in his early models that started the concern, which prompted James Hansen to hack the thermostat in his presentation to get funding for a supercomputer.

Warming became bad – really bad – soon after it started warming. Before that, cooling was generally assumed to be bad and warming – even anthropogenic warming – was usually assumed to be, if not good, then certainly benign. Indeed, aerosol pollutant cooling (postulated by some to be the cause of the 1960s cooling) was presumed by many scientists to be a greater threat than modest CO2 warming. But then warming took off and anthropogenically-induced Thermageddon took off with it. Now call me cynical but I firmly believe that, had it not warmed and had the cooling trend continued, scientists would have been telling us that anthropogenic aerosol cooling was the dominant cause; thus we must urgently reduce our emissions . . . . by ceasing to burn coal and stopping driving around in petrol and diesel cars! Either way, we’d have had fanatical Greens telling us that windmills and solar panels were the only answer to preventing catastrophic global climate change!

The problem with stating it like this is that it seems to suggest (at least I read it that way) that sceptics are aware of the risk but choose not to bother to do anything about it.

I have no idea what people actually think, but my impression is that those who self-identify as skeptics will find all sorts of arguments as to why we should not really do much to reduce our emissions. These vary from climate sensitivity being low, to trying to reduce our emissions doing all sorts of harm. Of course, there are risks associated with trying to address climate, which is why many support something like a carbon tax. In principle that is an estimate of future damages due to climate change (or, more technically, due to emitting CO2 into the atmosphere) and by including a carbon tax we would be paying the full price of using fossil fuels and the market could then evolve in some optimal way. I’m not entirely convinced myself, but I do think it would be a step in the right direction.

ATTP, any and all of those reasons are bundled together in the mind of a sceptic. Decision making is not a single data point. Is CAGW a possibility? Yes. Is it the worst risk out there? No. Should we do anything we can to reduce CO2? It depends on the real effect, not the unproven potential effect. If we acted on every threat greater than CAGW, we’d be broke already. Where are the space ships to save us from an extinction level meteorite? We don’t just have to theorise that those things happen we have good geological evidence that they do. Such an even could wipe out everything, not just the most vulnerable species.

A carbon tax is not an income tax, it’s like VAT, where the poor and smallest users suffer greatest proportional harm. A rich person can do what they like and a poor person would struggle for the basics. Even offsets are away to help the rich do as they like. It taxes the air we breathe. Even taxation on energy for businesses is discriminatory to the poor as they’re more likely to be employed in a high energy process. On the face of it an app designer uses less energy in their job than the steel worker but we don’t have a fair way to ensure that the office worker pays for the steel, the imports, the infrastructure that supports someone at a desk making a silly little program that will be forgotten in a decade if not next week.

Warmists want yes/no answers to questions where the issues aren’t black or white. Climate science is a whole colour chart in shades of grey. Why shouldn’t opinions be equally varied?

What you should be asking is ‘do warmists all agree?’ From observation, no. You’re as divided on the solutions as we are on the science. Logic would say that nuclear in large quantities, backed by flexible gas are the only options on the horizon. Anything else is just paying lipservice to the issue. In practical terms does it matter if we do nothing because we don’t think we have to or do nothing because we don’t like the viable solution?

To bring comments back on topic, the point at when global warming changed from being viewed as being “good” to being “bad” might be contained in references to the 1979 Charney Report “Ad hoc study group on carbon dioxide and Climate”. Most of these seem to be from the late 1970’s.

The forward to the Charney Report states

We now have incontrovertible evidence that the atmosphere is indeed changing and that we ourselves contribute to that change. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are steadily increasing and these changes are linked with man’s use of fossil fuels and exploitation of the land. Since carbon dioxide plays a significant role in the heat budget of the atmosphere, it is reasonable to suppose that continued increases would affect climate.
These concerns have prompted a number of investigations of the implications of increasing carbon dioxide. Their consensus has been that increasing carbon dioxide will lead to a warmer earth with a different distribution of climatic regimes.

It seems to be a consensus assumption is that because things will be different, they will be worse.

I’m not sure it’s possible to put a finger on when warming went from good the bad because it’s a construct of many opinions, not a fact. There were alarmist headlines back before WW1 about rapid warming. They were replaced by fears of cooling and even nuclear winter. For a lot of the time there was no consensus either way. Was the issue settled the first time Hansen thought he’d study CO2 or when he gave that presentation to congress? Initially climate science was tiny. Not a lot of people to join a gang. Was Al the turning point when he was hooked or when he made his movie? He didn’t persuade Clinton while they were in office.

All that happened through a period where public safety became a massive industry on its own. Finding hazards, fixing hazards, suing businesses over the injuries and insuring against what you might not have fixed. CAGW is the lovechild of the no win, no fee brigade and the cotton wool merchants. Look at medical science warning against disease X. They don’t know what it is, where it is, when it will strike or what it will do but they want governments to be ready for it because it might be deadly. Ready as in what? Have a piece of paper in a file saying ‘In case of disease X, put your head between your knees and kiss you ass goodbye’? Advice like that is less than useless.

Tinyco2, the “warming is bad” meme started in the mid seventies and coincided with the following:

1 the “aerosol ice age” meme was abandoned,
2 The (western) world turned from optimistic post war II sentiments to pessimistic no-future sentiments.
3 The environmental movement gained momentum with anti-nuclear protests, so a nuclear energy scenario became unlikely.
4 The oil crisis had just happened and energy scenarios turned to coal.
5 All this combined with the Budyko 6 degrees per CO2 doubling,

In what is probably a futile attempt to annoy ATTP, although since I don’t know him I cannot really be sure it will annoy him, I have lived last week through a temperature change of 14 degrees. Do I get a climate change survivor medal?

I found my copy of “The Environmental Handbook”((1)- copyright 1970)) which has a chapter written by the editor entitled “Energy” that says this on page 70- “Scientists are becoming worried about increasing CO2 levels because of the greenhouse effect, with it’s possible repercussions on the world climate.”

The author notes a few items in a Bibliography- I’ll note 1 item:
“Environmental Pollution Panel, President’s Science Advisory Committee, Restoring the Quality of Our Environment, US Government Printing office, Washington DC (especially Section 1 “Carbon Dioxide from Fossil Fuels- The Invisible Pollutant”).” No date noted. A bing search returned a reference to a memo to the infamous John Ehrlichman(2)

I have no idea what people actually think, but my impression is that those who self-identify as skeptics will find all sorts of arguments as to why we should not really do much to reduce our emissions. These vary from climate sensitivity being low, to trying to reduce our emissions doing all sorts of harm. Of course, there are risks associated with trying to address climate, which is why many support something like a carbon tax. In principle that is an estimate of future damages due to climate change (or, more technically, due to emitting CO2 into the atmosphere) and by including a carbon tax we would be paying the full price of using fossil fuels and the market could then evolve in some optimal way.

If the policy objective is to reduce global GHG emissions by say, 80% in the next 50 years, then policy must be applied to most countries (and all the major economies). The problem for advocates is that countries with 80%+ of the global population – and now accounting for almost two-thirds of global emissions – have shown no intention of committing to reducing their emissions. Further, the aimed for IPCC target of constraining emissions to 2C of warming implies that 75% of proven reserves and all unproven reserves (which could be 3-10 times the level) need to be left in the ground. So eliminating fossil fuels would have destroy the fossil-fuel producing economies of Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, Kuwait, etc. But annihilating fossil fuel production in western countries (and the oil majors in USA, UK, France etc) would likely push up oil and gas prices improving the economies of some pretty unsavoury political regimes. The implication is that whatever costs are borne by countries like the UK on reducing their emissions will have little impact to no impact on future costs from CAGW. Thus ATTP when you speak of the “we” it is clearly not for the vast majority of the world.

Although the carbon tax is theoretically the most efficient form of reducing emissions, a little knowledge of economics will tell you that expenditure on energy is largely inelastic with respect to price. As Richard Tol estimated in a 2013 paper, that carbon tax would need to start at about $210/tCO2 in 2020, then rising by 4-6% per year until using fossil fuels was unaffordable. Any rational Government, who aims at serving the best interests of its people, would not impose such blinkered policies, even if the CAGW is round the corner.

This brings us back to the subject of Paul Matthews post. Where is the identifiable source – not your vague opinions – of where warming was viewed as net harmful? This could be a starting point for fleshing out the where, when, type and magnitude of harms consequential on warming, so the people can adapt to them. Given that mitigation will be useless and net harmful to any country that practices it, will you, Ken Rice, be the one that blocks real scientists from providing the information that can reduce the harms? Or are you afraid that in fleshing out the prospective problems there will be turn out to be nothing of substance?